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Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 11:40:42 -0400 (EDT)
The following lies, threats, racist imagery, etc. are from Albright's
OpEd piece in yesterday's New York Times. Letters to the editor are
critically needed (letters@nytimes.com).
=========================================
August 17, 1998
The U.S. Will Stand Firm on Iraq, No
Matter What
By MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
At the end of gulf war, conventional wisdom had it that
Saddam Hussein would not last six months. Unfortunately, conventional
wisdom was wrong and we have had to live and deal with the
consequences ever since. For seven years, we have successfully
contained Saddam by maintaining the toughest multilateral sanctions in
history, while the United Nations special commission on arms
inspections, or Unscom, has managed to find and destroy many of
Saddam's missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
Periodically, Saddam rattles his cage, hoping that by
provoking a crisis he can wear away at the will of the international
community while we either stop paying attention or end up spending our
precious defense dollars dispatching and recalling our forces. We will
keep our eye on the ball: the threat to our national interests posed
by Iraq. We will decide how and when to respond to Iraq's actions,
based on the threat they pose to Iraq's neighbors, to regional
security and to U.S. vital interests.
Our assessment will include Saddam's capacity to
reconstitute, use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In
considering our response, we have ruled nothing out, including the use
of force. We have reconfigured our forces in the gulf so that we can
react swifly and forcefully when necessary.
In the meantime, Saddam's decision to suspend cooperation
with the International Atomic Energy Agency and U.N. special
commission violates the agreement he reached with Secretary General
Kofi Annan less than six months ago and represents a direct challenge
to Security Council authority. This is a confrontation between Iraq
and the United Nations. It is therefore up to Mr. Annan and the
Security Council to make sure that Saddam reverses course and
cooperates with Unscom. And if they fail to persuade him to back down,
we will have laid the foundation for taking our own decisive action.
Supporting Unscom is at the heart of our efforts to prevent
Saddam Hussein from threatening his neighborhood, and the United
States has always been its strongest backer. Because the U.N. special
commission has been so effective in disarming Iraq, despite Iraq's
elaborate efforts to hide and lie about its weapons of mass
destruction programs, Saddam has sought to discredit the organization.
Unfortunately, while this is patently untrue, some in the Security
Council have lent support to this effort.
We have taken the opposite approach, staunchly defending
Unscom and its chairman, Richard Butler. We have supported his conduct
of intrusive inspections while seeking to insure that Saddam was not
able to exploit this effort to the disadvantage of the U.N. inspection
team in the Security Council. Since the last crisis, Unscom has in fact
been very effective. It has carried out a range of inspection
activities, some of which turned up very serious evidence that Saddam
has still not accounted for many undeclared chemical warheads. Other
evidence demonstrated that Iraq had weaponized deadly VX gas, directly
contradicting Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz's claims to have fully
disclosed Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.
This month, Unscom had intended to follow up with some
particularly intrusive inspections, which he supported. However, when
Iraq suspended all inspections on Aug. 4, it was clear to us that
Saddam Hussein had done something which even his backers in the
Security Council could not defend. It was in that context that I
consulted with Mr. Butler who came to his own conclusion that it was
wiser to keep the focus on Iraq's open defiance of the Security
Council. Had Unscom gone ahead with the intrusive inspections, they
would have been blocked anyway, but that would have allowed some in
the Security Council to muddy the waters by claiming again that
Unscom had provoked Iraq.
Our purpose now is to get the Security Council to face up to
its responsibilities to the U.N. special commission and the
International Atomic Energy Agency. These organizations have been
clearly mandated by the Council to carry out the necessary measures to
disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery
systems. If the Council fails to persuade Saddam to resume
cooperation, then we will have a free hand to use other means to
support Unscom's mandate.
Let's be clear: what Saddam Hussein really wants is to have
sanctions lifted while retaining his residual
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. We will not allow him to
achieve these objectives. As long as Saddam refuses to comply with the
Security Council resolutions, the comprehensive sanctions on Iraq will
remain in place.
This denies Saddam one of his most urgent objectives: to
regain control of Iraq's revenues so he can reconstitute his ability
to threaten his neighbors. His lack of cooperation with Unscom may
delay the day when Iraq is fully disarmed. But this same lack of
cooperation will also help us insure that the sanctions are
maintained, thereby doing much to prevent Saddam from rearming Iraq.
Some will argue, as they did in the last crisis, that this
imposes an inhumane burden on the Iraqi people who are not to blame
for Saddam's behavior. But this time, Iraqis are benefiting from the
expansion of the "oil for food" arrangements which are now insuring
that every Iraqi receives a daily ration basket equivalent to the
recommended caloric intake of the average American.
Under this arrangement, however, Saddam is denied access to
the oil revenues. Instead, the money is escrowed in a U.N. account,
and released only for supplies approved by the U.N. sanctions
committee.
In short, Saddam may be rattling his cage again, but he has
no way to break out of it. Through his latest actions he has thrown
away the key and only helped us to keep his cage in place. One way or
the other, his latest effort to blackmail the international community
into accepting his false claims of compliance will not be allowed to
succeed.
Madeleine K. Albright is the Secretary of State.
--
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